Gun battles seem to be the order of the day. Police officers have been killed. There’s also looting. But a police spokesman says about the business district, “There was some shootings last night but some amount of calm has returned.” Phew. A state of emergency has been declared that basically give police carte blanche to…
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Jamaica is a rough place. 2.7 million people and 1,500 homicides. That’s a higher homicide rate than Baltimore… but lower than Baltimore’s Eastern District. It’s also dangerous for police, with 5 official line-of-duty deaths per year (though I suspect many more police die in less official ways). Jamaican police are known to kill a lot…
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Sometimes, as our drug war continues unabated, it’s easy to forget just how much progress has been made in fighting prohibition. Just a few years ago this kind of talk from an active police chief was inconceivable. It’s the kind of talk that encourages honest debate. Which is just what we need because advocates of…
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In 2007, Mexican and US drug agents raided a home in Mexico City. Over $200,000,000 in cash was found. Lot’s of other stuff, too. Like tigers and gold guns! It’s pretty impressive. I put the pictures in a PDF file. It’s not recent, but I just got an email with the pictures from a student.…
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Not the government wants you to know. Immediately after Calderon came to office in late 2006, he deployed up to 50,000 troops in a frontal battle with narcotics cartels, a move that drew widespread praise for its courage. More than three years later, the pace of killings is soaring and public security worries are beginning…
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And Mexico is no exception.
There’s a good article by Tom Siegfried in Science News about what’s wrong with statistics. Take the idea of statistical significance. Much of social science is based on the (very arbitrary) idea that for any given correlation, there should be a less than 5% chance of that result being due to random chance. [And as…
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Evidently, the MTA (New York’s subways and buses) could raise enough money to prevent massive service cuts if they could only collect the fare from 27 million dollarsof fare evaders. Meanwhile, the NYPD arrests more people for misdemeanor drugs possession (half of those for the lowest level of marijuana possession) than it does for fare…
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From the Wall Street Journal: Growing numbers of Mexican and U.S. officials say—at least privately—that the biggest step in hurting the business operations of Mexican cartels would be simply to legalize their main product: marijuana. Long the world’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana accounts for more than half the revenues of Mexican cartels. “Economically, there…
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I wasn’t even going to link to this story because I don’t want to repeat myself more than necessary. Here’s the point: black New Yorkers are seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. For a moment, let’s put aside the actually story (not that we should). For the sake of…
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